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“Super sponges” are covalent organic frameworks (COFs): porous crystals whose internal surfaces can adsorb gas molecules. A 2009 study examined COFs’ uptake of hydrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide, prompting interest in lightweight gas storage and carbon capture. Those uses were research prospects, not proof of commercially deployed technology.
What are these “super sponges”?
COFs are crystalline materials built from light elements, including hydrogen, boron, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Ring-based building blocks connect through strong covalent bonds to form frameworks with pores. Chemistry World reported pore sizes of 9–32 Å in the materials discussed in 2009; that range comes from the news report, rather than an independent check of the full study. Chemistry World’s 2009 report describes the structures and their gas adsorption.
The “sponge” image is useful, but not literal: gas molecules are adsorbed on the framework’s internal surfaces and within its pores. It is distinct from absorption, in which a substance is taken into the bulk of another material.
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Which gases did the study examine?
Hiroyasu Furukawa and Omar Yaghi studied how much hydrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide different COFs could adsorb. Chemistry World reported that some of the tested COFs had greater adsorption capacities than MOF candidates in the comparison described. That is a result reported for those materials and that study—not evidence that COFs outperform metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) across all gases, conditions, or uses. The report does not provide a complete head-to-head dataset for ranking the material families.
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The underlying study is identified as H. Furukawa et al., published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 2009, DOI 10.1021/ja9015765.
Why gas adsorption drew interest
Hydrogen and methane storage
A porous material that holds gas could potentially help store hydrogen or methane, including in applications where weight matters. But adsorption capacity alone does not establish whether a storage system is practical. A useful comparison would also need to account for operating pressure and temperature, material density and usable volumetric storage, heat released or required during adsorption, energy needed to recover the gas, durability, moisture tolerance, and cost. The 2009 news report does not supply results across all those measures.
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Carbon dioxide capture
CO2 adsorption also suggested a possible role in capture. A promising material would need to capture carbon dioxide selectively from the relevant gas mixture and release it efficiently for reuse or disposal. The reported study’s interest in CO2 uptake is not, by itself, evidence of a working capture process or commercial deployment.
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Andy Cooper, then director of the Centre for Materials Discovery in Liverpool, said a new material would have to be sufficiently more efficient than carbon to justify its additional cost. He also highlighted hydrogen’s low heat of sorption: in the report’s framing, hydrogen needed to be cooled to liquid-nitrogen temperatures to “stick” within framework materials. These were comments in a 2009 news story, not a current, comprehensive engineering assessment of COFs or hydrogen-storage systems. Chemistry World reproduces the comments and the study’s context.
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Yaghi expressed optimism about making the materials, citing multi-gram laboratory quantities and the use of non-exotic molecules. He said, “There are no exotic molecules involved so cost should not be prohibitive, and we have made multi-gram quantities in the lab, so industry should be able to scale up far more.” That is the researcher’s reported outlook; it does not establish that industrial scale-up or commercial fuel tanks followed.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How are COFs different from MOFs?
Both are porous framework materials, but their names refer to different chemistry. COFs are assembled through covalent bonds between light-element building blocks. MOFs use metal ions or clusters linked by organic molecules. The families may be discussed together as porous materials for gas handling, but they are not interchangeable.
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A 2020 DGIST release described a dual post-synthetic modification protocol for MOFs, intended to add functional groups and mesoscopic pores, and discussed possible uses in storage, separation, sensing, and purification. That is later context for MOF research—not a direct follow-up result for the COFs in the 2009 report. DGIST’s 2020 release covers that MOF work.
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What the “super sponge” claim does—and does not—mean
- It does mean that researchers investigated porous COFs for adsorption of hydrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide.
- It does mean that the 2009 report described some tested COFs as exceeding MOF candidates in adsorption capacity in its comparison.
- It does not mean that COFs are proven better than MOFs for every gas or operating condition.
- It does not mean that COFs became commercially established gas tanks or carbon-capture systems.
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